Trapped in Nauru

How do you explain to the children that Daddy can’t find his way home?

“Initially, I told them that he had some important work that Nauru needed him to do and we weren’t sure how long it was going to take,” said Katy Le Roy.

But the children said, “Oh, we need him more!”

Eventually, Le Roy’s husband, Roland Kun, told his children on the phone from Nauru that his passport had been cancelled and he had to try to get another one.

That shouldn’t take long? It is 81 days and counting since Kun was removed from a plane as he was about to depart Nauru for New Zealand.

The children, Rosa, Yoshi and Hana, are 20 months, 5 and 7 years. The older two understand that their father is trapped.

Le Roy: “They are very upset and they miss him a lot. They know he desperately wants to be back home but that he can’t travel until he gets a passport.”

Kun is a native of Nauru, an MP who appears to be being punished for criticising a government that marches to nothing other than its own tune.

Stopping someone from going overseas is what you expect from the former Soviet Union countries, not Pacific countries.

And in January 2014 its judiciary was dispatched in a coup because, it is claimed, Nauru’s leaders didn’t like its decisions.

When Kun and several other opposition MPs complained about what had happened to the judiciary, they were suspended without pay in May last year. Kun became trapped in June this year. There was no warning and no charge has been laid against him. He is in limbo, living with Nauruan relatives and free to drive around the 21sq km island but not to leave.

Fentex

I’m getting pretty tired of the white guilt card that sees us shoveling money into these countries

This foreign policy is about influence in our region, not guilt. And Nauru’s problem’s are caused by foreign cash seeking influence – Nauru’s governments legitimacy is unravelling because it wants to break it’s own laws to satisfy Australia’s requirements to fund it’s detention camps there.

It is decisions that would hamper those camps that saw the judiciary deposed.

I’m pleased to see our government act, but it’s not likely to be effective as Australia’s funding is more important to Nauru.

David Garrett

Mr blobby: You are a few years behind the play old son..Tonga has genunie representative democracy – to commoner dominated assembly – for two elections now…it was perhaps a little predictable that after the first one, the commoner members could not agree on a PM from among their ranks, so chose a Nobel…The PM is now the commoner MP Akilisi Pohiva, a long time thorn in the side of the Tongan monarchy and establishment. I predict he wont do any better than the last guy.

More to the point, New Zealand does not fund any of the Tongan judicial system. Australia used to fund one Judge, but the Aussies then had the temerity – in my view – to demand as a condition of continuing funding that Tonga repeal its statute which makes the death penalty still a possible punishment for murder (last enforced n 1982)

As a proud sovereign nation, they quite rightly told the imperialist Aussies to fuck off. So now they fund their own Judiciary..with some funding from the Commonwealth Secretariat, I think.

Oh, and Tonga doesn’t “want independence”…it was never colonised, so is and was always independent.